Contribution à l’étude de l’utilité des normes comptables pour les investisseurs : application à l’identification des actifs incorporels dans le cas des regroupements d’entreprises

Accounting standards, and financial statements disclosed in accordance with these standards, aim to reduce information asymmetry between insiders and outsiders. So, in a context of external growth, Purchase Price Allocations’ works (PPA) may contribute to improve usefulness of financial statements for the benefit of investors favoring separate recognition of intangible assets from goodwill. Yet, some doubts are likely to impede these standards reducing information asymmetry. First, relying on a linguistic model inspired by Gray (1988), we underline that environmental factors, as well as factors related to standards themselves, may limit usefulness of financial statements for investors. Besides, literature casts doubts on the capacity of standards dedicated to PPAs to reduce information asymmetry. In order to appreciate whether these doubts are justified, or not, we developed an empirical model relying on an event study, carried on over the 2002-2008 period in the United-States in a context of external growth and measuring usefulness of financial statements through quality of their enforcement. This event study is centered on the disclosure of the PPA in 10-Q/K. Our model first consists in computing a proxy for the PPA’s quality. Second, we test how this proxy impacts consensus of analysts as well as the market as a whole. According to our works, accounting information is not properly taken into account by financial analysts to issue their consensus, neither by market as a whole, even if it enables to predict stock price over a 50 days period.